We Can Live Long And Prosper

Each morning when I wake up the first thing I do is fight off the bugaboo creepy crawlers of gloom.

Soon I know that everything is OK and I look forward to the challenge and opportunity the day offers.

The future looks even brighter having heard Peter Diamandis present at the Saturday morning METal breakfast in Los Angeles.

Peter Diamandis on a weightless flight with Zero-G

Diamandis, the Bronx born Greek of immigrant parents, brims with confidence and ideas. His efforts have brought forth expanded human space flight, cars that get 100 miles per gallon, breakthroughs in medical science and the realization that things are much better than most of us think. And that’s just a capsule of what he’s up to.

Diamandis is perhaps best known for being chairman and CEO of X Prize Foundation, which provides multi-million dollar awards in contests that bring forth radical breakthroughs in science, medicine, energy, education and other areas. This includes the $10 million prize to SpaceShipOne, the first non-government piloted spacecraft that led to Virgin Galactic and commercial space flight.

When asked of his motivation in life Diamandis said, “The realization that each has the ability to make dreams come true.” He also prefers working with people who are “willing to risk it all.” His personal motto is: “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”

Here’s something else. Diamandis doesn’t live with a linear world view as we have for the last 200,000 years. The linear world is logical and time oriented, where each event has a cause and effect. The problem here is linear thinking makes it hard to deal with the flood of information and change pouring on us at an increasing rate.

“The way we think is local and linear but the world is changing in an exponential fashion,” he said.

SpaceShipOne

Instead we need to think in leaps and bounds and open our minds to the possibility and opportunity for explosive shifts in innovation and disruption. The rate of technical progress is doubling every decade and that shift is accelerating. What it means is this century will see 1,000 times the advancement in technological change than the prior century.

It’s for this reason that Diamandis and the genius futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil established Singularity University, with a mission “to assemble, educate and inspire leaders” who can understand and develop “exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges.”

Diamandis and Kurzweil are two peas in a pod, and to the linear thinking man they might seem a little bit far out. Both of them believe in a world and Universe beyond your wildest imaginations.

They see the time when computers will have the ability of the human brain, and with people able to live hundreds of years. They envision tremendous breakthroughs of all kinds to the point that it makes me believe – despite the constant insanity that seems to plague the world – that everything is going to be OK. No, really.

What you’ve seen on Star Trek will, in essence, become reality.

Audi V 10 @ METal

*Other notes:

Last night I was chatting with my good friend John Sutton who shared some great insight he picked up. “ROI,” said John. “Do you know what that is? It’s not return on investment. It’s return on INVOLVEMENT.” And, he said, “It’s not about what’s new. It’s about what’s NOW.”

Back to METal. Each week METal founder and host Ken Rutkowski asks people at the breakfast for the first time who they are and what they do. Here’s a sample from Saturday: We had a writer and producer from PBS; a filmmaker, a guy who shark dives without cages, a tech entrepreneur from London and one from Romania, several highly accomplished Web designers, a singer/songwriter, a leader in the space tourism industry and another guy who described himself as a “super car engineer.”

If I got this right, he was the guy with some awesome 850HP Audi with a carbon fiber chassis in the parking lot. I think he said it can do 240 mph. That’s the photo here. I took these other photos of cars driven by the Men of METal. Pretty awesome, don’t ya think?